Customer experience fulfillment and the technologies that help you keep your CX promises

Throughout our long careers in customer experience, we’ve often heard potential clients share a sentiment similar to: 

“I’ve done everything I can think of to improve my customer service operations, but my CSAT is still low, and customer attrition is high. What am I missing? Where else can I make changes to improve CX?” 

The conundrum these clients face is that they have already done much to improve what they consider customer-facing operations. Maybe they moved their contact center to the cloud, modernized their digital presence, and introduced self-service options to their customers. But still, customers aren’t getting the experience they want. 

The issue here is that many organizations view customer experience through a lens that is too narrow. The customer experience doesn’t end after the customer speaks with a service agent or chatbot. Their experience isn’t fulfilled until their issue or interaction ends on a positive note. 

What gets in the way of that experience fulfillment often happens outside the customer-facing purview. Outdated processes and disconnected technologies trap key information in the back- and mid-office.

As a CX professional, how do you jailbreak that information and connect those technologies so that you can keep your CX promises? It all starts with your data.

In this article, you’ll learn how knowledge management systems and advanced CRM technologies connect and enhance data across your organization to fulfill your customer experience promises.

Data management and unification: The first steps in customer experience fulfillment

Irrespective of the discrete moments that matter on journeys that bring the customer experience to life, one common element remains at the heart of every interaction – data.

Managing broader customer journeys spanning multiple systems and departments requires richer data federation capabilities than traditional integration approaches. Curating the data and – effectively, the service catalogue – is essential if we aim to monitor, measure, manage, and ultimately modernize the CCaaS stack and to navigate the end customers’ service journey. 

Organizations need to bring data together across disparate applications and systems of record and make it available to their AI solutions, internal applications, and agents – but how?

The answer lies in knowledge management systems and CRM (customer relationship management) technologies. Innovations in these technologies have taken them to a place where they can unify and structure data and then orchestrate remedial actions across the entire customer journey. 

Knowledge management systems: The key to getting your data house in order

Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply connect data across technologies and departmental functions. Often company data is duplicative, inaccurate, or full of contradictions. This is where knowledge management systems play a key role.

Like the new breed of CRM, knowledge management systems have taken a huge leap forward. Integrated with CRMs, databases, and other information repositories, new AI-powered knowledge management can pull data, categorize it, clean it, and make it easily accessible.

When data is unstructured – as in the case of pdfs, support tickets, voice recordings, etc. – the knowledge management system can leverage NLP (natural language processing) and ML (machine learning) to tag, classify and organize this data in a way that makes it accessible across channels. Modern knowledge management systems can even use content intelligence to scan thousands of documents to identify quality issues or contradictions. 

CRM: The next frontier in data unification and customer journey orchestration

If creating clean, accurate, accessible data is the first step, the second step is unifying that data across departments and systems – and that’s where the rubber really meets the road.

Our colleague John Seeds, CMO of TTEC Digital, said it best in a recent blog:

“Augmented with AI, today’s CRMs are platforms prepared to fulfill the promise of orchestrating the entire customer journey, harnessing CX data to guide real-time actions and deep customer insights, and connecting an organization’s customer engagements with mid- and back-office fulfillment.” 

In essence, the new breed of CRMs connects previously siloed data points and interactions to create a complete customer experience. Remember when we said that outdated processes and disconnected technologies trap key information in the back- and mid-office? CX professionals need to pay attention to the back- and mid-office functions if they want to deliver on customer expectations. An advanced CRM, such as ServiceNow, is what can make this happen. It’s where we truly begin to cross the chasm to connect the front office consumer, to mid office operations, and back-office systems. 

The modern CRM enables the integration of customer, product, and market data to facilitate personalized interactions, service automation, marketing automation, and other functionalities. This integration happens within the CRM itself, eliminating the need for disparate, non-communicative systems. The latest advancements in CRM technology also enhance visibility, increase automation, and foster a cohesive ecosystem of data and collaboration – empowering brands to effectively deliver on their customer experience commitments.

What’s next?

Existing siloed processes, siloed data, and siloed productivity lead to disconnected customer experiences, team inefficiency and unhappy customers and employees. Fundamentally, harnessing enterprise-wide workflows and data will ensure that customers don’t fall through the cracks of departmental tools and that contact centers become the key trigger to actions that fulfill the customer experience.